One of the main reasons Egypt is such a backward society is its absurd obsession with Israel. It’s not just the Islamists who have the Jewish state perpetually on the brain, it is also the supposed reformer Mohammed ElBaradei (who just ritualistically flexed his macho toward Israel), not to mention Mr. Sameold/sameold Amr Moussa and, I regret to say from private conversations, even some of our democracy-oriented blogger friends (who say they have to pretend to be anti-Israel in order to gain power, which, of course, makes them enablers of the same obsession whether they believe it or not.) Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi is demanding the Israelis pay back Egypt for gas discounts during the Mubarak period

What is emerging from the Egyptian revolution is a kind of mass cultural tantrum coupled with an infantile desire to blame others for their own problems, a sure prescription, as an family therapist can tell you, for never fixing them. What Egypt needs is some tough love from Dr. Phil or somebody. Otherwise they are headed for a worse period than they had under Mubarak – a lot worse. What rational person could be optimistic?

On the other hand, the good news is – guess which two countries have the biggest oil-shale deposits in the world?

11 Comments, 7 Threads

egyptians still maintain that they won the war against israel, when everybody else in the world knows that they lost badly. a cognitive dissonance of such magnitude will make anyone hate the subject of such dissonance.

they don’t need doctor phil, they need a forceful intervention. for example, usa could stop delivering any aid to egypt until its government publicly admits losing all their wars with israel, and apologizes for starting them.

Which country controls the Sinai and the Suez? Egypt, so winning is a matter of perspective to say the least. Clearly you lack the ability to see from any perspective other than your own. If you tried for a second you would see most Arabs would tell you Israel started all the problems when they stole Palestine. Pretending that didn’t happen doesn’t make it go away, especially in the Arab world where most of the Palestinian refugees are. Waiting till they all die off and making it illegal to recognize they ever existed will not stop future generations from remembering. Addressing their right to return is critical to long-term peace, and impossible when the discussion is clouded with non-sense and bigotry. So if you really care about the security of the people of Israel, you might want to think about how moral it is to go around instigating conflict, especially from the security of your keyboard

The one thing that cannot be denied is the thing Egyptians have about Israel. It must be nearly universal throughout the country. The Egyptians have roads and museums named Oct.6, the first and last good day they had in the 1973 War against Israel. The Egyptians have indeed turned that defeat into a victory; there was recently a series of articles in an Egyptian newspaper describing in detail how Israel has really made up a bunch of nonsense and that the Egyptian army did far better than history allows for.

Part of that Oct.6 syndrome is an Islamic thing; muslims do not live in the same world those of us in the West do. In America, we are taught to take hard looks at ourselves but for whatever reasons, muslim culture is completely the opposite. You can find similar narratives in Syria about their military debacles versus Israel and among Hizbollah in Lebanon who claim to have run Israel out of the country in the last dust up in 2006.

In point of fact, false narratives run throughout Islamic versions of history; how else can one explain calling the modern West ‘Crusaders’ in speaking of the transient and territorially insignificant conquests of the medieval Crusaders? In fact, it was Islam who conquered land in space and time that is probably 2 orders of magnitude above what the West ever did in return. And the Islamic conquests have remained permanent in almost every territory. Most notably, it took Spain and Portugal 8 centuries to kick out Islamic armies and colonists.

I have told my friends in Egypt that the thing they have for Israel is, philosophically speaking, one of their nation’s greatest weaknesses. I tell them to simply forget about Israel, stop thinking about it. Israel is neither here nor there in the scheme of Egypt and will bring them only disaster if they insist on following up their weird impulses.

Best case scenario for Egypt as a nation if they could discomfit Israel in any military way is what: nothing really other than messaging hurt pride and gaining some prestige.

Worst case scenario: dams being built to the South of Egypt in order to extort some control over this hostile impulse together with the loss of the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula. This would almost certainly be accompanied by a revolution against whoever was in charge and a purge.

The Egyptian dream of rushing to the aid of the Palestinian Arabs if pursued will in the end prove the undoing of Egypt. In any event, the idea that the Americans would ever refit and resupply an Egyptian army that uses U.S. equipment in Gaza is a fantasy. El Baradei is running for President and talking smack against Israel is his baby kissing and hard hat photo moment at the factory. Make no mistake, El Baradei is hostile towards Israel, but has lived in Europe long enough to have a pragmatic view that does not allow for him to be hung in Tahrir Square.

Mubarak and friends have reinforced the hatred of Israel with ordinary Egyptians. You wanted stability, you had it with some caveats. All of our friends and allies in the region are despots and use Israel as their bogeyman. And vice versa. Talk to any Israeli about Egyptians, and they will tell you that they are animals. Where did they learn this? from their Zionist government.
I am the best of both worlds; I was born in Egypt and I’m Jewish.
And I think that co-existence between the two was very viable until the Suez Canal crisis, and later the foundation of the state of Israel made the region very unstable. Thus the propping up of dictators. You choose.

There is lots of oil shale under Jordan as well. IIRC, when Ken Salazar, as governor of CO, refused to grant production permits to Shell to begin producing there the Shell executives packed up their toolkits and began working on similar projects east of the river. Those shale deposits are quite ubiquitous in the region.

This is not just an Egyptian problem, it affects the whole Muslim world. It’s probably even worse in Pakistan, which tends to blame India for everything, even though the Indians have no interest in taking over Pakistan (India has enough headaches of it’s own).

The Egyptian army has been getting $2 billion a year in US funding. The only mission they plan and train for is to invade the unnamed enemy to the north east. Fortunately, the senior officers in the army are fairly moderate and friendly to the US.

However, the same was true in Turkey until about 5 years ago, when the pro-Islamist government started rooting out secular officers from the Turkish army and promoting Islamists. If this happens to the Egyptian army the muslim brotherhood will become very influential in the army, and there will be another war.